The
Johnny Depp Zone Interview
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Johnny
Handsome

by Stephen Rebello
Photographs by Albert Sanchez
Movieline
May 1990

Can
Johnny Depp, TV’s tattooed teen idol with the best cheekbones
since
Gene Tierney, make the leap to the big time with outré
movies like Cry-Baby and Edward
Scissorhands—or is
this just his 15 minutes of fame?

Wayne
Newton blew away Johnny Depp in Vegas the other night. It
all went down in the Goldwyn Ballroom at
Bally’s,
where thousands of movie exhibitors—woozy from sampling
faux
butter, state-of-the-art popcorn, and ergonomic theater seats—had
gathered to chow down and to ogle movie stars, up close.

Newly
named “Male Star of Tomorrow” by the National
Association of
Theater Owners, 27-year-old Depp was sharing the dais with fellow
honorees Anjelica Huston, “Female Star of the Year”
for Enemies,
A Love Story, a 20th-Century-Fox release, Jeff Bridges,
“Male
Star of the Year,” for The Fabulous Baker Boys,
from Fox,
“Producer of the Year” Joel Silver, maker of
Fox’s upcoming
Ford Fairlane, and Batman
director Tim Burton,
“Director of the Year,” for whom Depp will next
appear in the Fox
movie Edward Scissorhands opposite
“Female Star of Tomorrow”
Winona Ryder, number one foxy lady in the young actor’s
private
life. Cozy.

Depp
sat quietly, “generally at a loss for words,” according
to
one observer, as lights danced off the obelisk-shaped lucite trophy
that sat on the table before him with his name etched on it. Were he
and his obviously-in-love girlfriend awed by the responsibility of
living up to the standards set by such past “Stars of
Tomorrow”
as Andrew Stevens, Robert Hayes, Helen Slater, and Morgan Fairchild?
We may never know. But after performances by comic Andrew Dice Clay
and Tone Loc, stars of Ford Fairlane, came
Depp’s blow-away
moment supreme: a one-hour “surprise” concert
appearance by Wayne
Newton, another Ford Fairlane star, who—as if his
ebony
helmet of superstar hair and rutting caterpillar eyebrows were not
sufficient—purred congratulations to the award recipients,
but
singled out, with a wave of his hand, “My good
friend—Johnnnn-eeee DEPP!”

“I
was in shock”
admits Depp a few days later, slouched in a back booth of a 24-hour
Sunset Strip hash joint, where a waiter’s trilly greeting
upon his
arrival (“Here’s our wandering waif!”)
suggests that Depp is a
regular. Depp’s jet-black leased BMW ragtop sits wedged
between
R.V.s and Harleys in the parking lot outside, where
up-from-underground trash director John Waters, maker of
Depp’s
first starring movie Cry-Baby,
was recently robbed of $80 at gunpoint. Despite Depp’s matted
hair,
shades, and facial scruff, every server in the place takes turn
filling his coffee cup, pretending not to stare at the kid who became
a cover boy cutie-pie playing Tom Hanson, undercover cop, on 21
Jump Street. Dressed
in a
vintage black jacket with brocade collar over a faded tank top and
bagged-out jeans, Depp looks as glamorously disheveled as an
off-hours Melrose Avenue waiter, or the canniest scam artist working
the Sunset Strip.

Millions
ride on whether this kid with eyes that radiate a used-up,
fuck-it-all allure will deliver more in movies than the
best cheekbones since Gene Tierney. Right now, Depp is chain-smoking
Marlboros, wolfing down bacon, eggs, and caffeine, and talking about
a Real Star. “I mean, it’s WAYNE NEWTON, man, LIVE!
He’s an
institution, like Elvis. Wayne Newton said my name and it MADE MY
NIGHT.” Newton’s very essence draws from Depp a
Vegas riff that
suggests perhaps he and kitsch were on speaking terms before he
tangled last summer with John (Pink
Flamingos, Hairspray)
Waters. “I
love the whole flavor of Vegas,” Depp says, grinning, but
serious
as a slot-machine junkie. “I love the big, gaudy sunglasses,
the
bat-wing collars, the Nik-Nik shirts, the leisure suits and white
patent leather shoes.”

The
subject of Vegas leads to a Depp litany of other guiltless pleasures:
Pia Zadora in The Lonely Lady,
late-period Elvis (“I gotta get a ceramic bust of
him,” he says),
true crime books, paintings by John Wayne Gacy, Sinatra, and John
Davidson, of whom Depp cherishes a “truly frightening
videotape
where he sings, like, Hall and Oates songs in really tight polyester
bellbottoms.” Depp frowns at his coffee spoon, then holds it
up for
me to see. “Why do people wipe boogers on spoons?”
he wonders. I
offer, “Because in a place like this, there’s no
room left under
the table.” Depp smirks in a sly, white-trashy way that
suggests
why he and Cry-Baby director John Waters got along
like a mobile home afire.

Depp’s
thicket of eyelashes, tsunami of hair, and pouty lips would surely
have splashed him across the pages of the same fan rags of the
‘50s
and ‘60s that devoured the Rocks, Tonys, Tabs, and Troys of
the
moment. Today, the Tiger Beat
Adonis-in-jockey-shorts scenes in Cry-Baby should
make pre-teen girls squirm and swoon for him like an old-style
screen idol. At least that is what Universal, which is selling the
movie entirely on Depp, hopes. But questions arise as the curtains
part on Depp’s first movie since he began fluttering hearts
as TV’s
dishiest undercover cop. Do he and James Dean have anything more in
common than a pair of initials? Is Depp more than merely another of
the Dean pretenders of the Michael Parks, Christopher Jones, or
Maxwell Caulfield variety?

Cry-Baby,
or “King Creole on
acid” as its director calls it, is PG-13, filtered Waters: no
three-hundred-pound doggie-doo-eating drag queen, no lesbian glory
hole scene, no “I blew Richard Speck!”
punchlines. Depp is
the
eponymous Wade “Cry-Baby” Walker, teary-eyed leader
of the ‘50s
hoodlum gang, The Drapes. He slides off his cycle, adjusts his
crotch, and woos Allison, queen of the Baltimore
“squares,” by
murmuring: “Orphans have special needs.” Director
Waters, who has employed in films such pink
flamingos of beefcake as Tab Hunter and Troy Donahue, wrote the
script with no fix on who might play his studly comic lead. Then, he
found young America’s wet dream in twenty bucks’
worth of teeny
magazines. “The only other person who could have played it
was
Charles Starkweather, and he was dead,” Waters explains.

In
search of “a real movie star,” Waters wrote Depp, asking
if the actor would look over his script once he completed it.
Luckily, Waters says, Depp had already seen and liked his other
movies, “which is not something you lie about.”
Says Depp, who ranks
Waters’s Female
Trouble atop
his list of
favorite flicks, “John’s was the best script around—most
unique, best-written, funniest. It makes fun of the whole teen
dilemma thing, and was such a joke on how people perceive me, or what
has been shoved down their throats. I was doing fast food every
week,” he says of his TV series. “I wanted to work
with an outlaw.” It hardly hurt that the outlaw—cash-rich
from investments in Cry-Baby by
director Jim (Big Business)
Abrahams and producer Brian (Parenthood)
Grazer—could pay Depp’s $1 million salary.

But
some in Hollywood advised Depp against starring even in
candy-colored, nouveau Waters, which contains such moments to cherish
as pregnant gang moll Ricki Lake cooing, “Oooh, I feel so good
all knocked up,” and a French kiss montage that must be seen
to be
believed. Should an incipient sex god do self-parody before his time?
“There were people who thought Cry-Baby was a bad
idea,” admits Depp, who receives over 10,000 fan
letters
a month. “But I’ve always admired people like John
Waters, who’s
never compromised, or Iggy Pop [the singer, also in the movie],
who’s
been through the wringer just because he stuck to his guns. The easy
way is boring to me.”

Shooting
the movie in Water’s beloved Baltimore (“the
strangest place I’ve
ever been,” Depp says) left the star and director wanting
more.
“I’d love to
become a member of his repertory company,” says Depp. Waters,
who
already has a Cry-Baby successor in mind for Depp,
says, “He’s everything
a star should
be, the very opposite of a flash-in-the-pan. It’s almost
as exciting as it must have been working with Johnny Halliday in
France in the beginning.”

Part
Cherokee, Depp grew up in Owensboro, Kentucky, the son of an
engineer, John Christopher Depp, and Betty Sue, a waitress. When Depp
was six, his family (he has two older sisters and a brother) moved to
Miramar, Florida. Early on, Depp got a line on the marketability of
charisma from an uncle, “an old-time preacher” of
the
fire-and-brimstone-and-salvation school of theatrics. Growing up,
Depp caught his uncle’s act as often as possible, drawn by
the
“strangeness of seeing all these adults bursting into tears,
running up and grabbing his feet when he’d say,
‘Come up and be
saved!’ It was an obtuse sort of image for a kid.”
Obtuse, maybe,
and one unforgettable role model.

By
the time his parents divorced (each has remarried since), Depp, 15,
was Johnny Too Bad. A striking, rangy kid, he had dabbled in
“every
kind of drug there was” by age 11. Between bouts of swiping
six-packs, breaking and entering, and classroom-trashing, Depp lost
his cherry at age 13, and ditched school for good at 16. “It
was
fairly normal,” Depp says. “When you’re
13, 14, and you hang
out with a bunch of guys and the junior high prom just
doesn’t do
it for you, you go out and do something.
Experiment. You live in Miami as a kid and [drugs are]
everywhere. You try it for the usual reasons: peer pressure,
curiosity, boredom.” Depp left home to live in a
‘67 Impala with
a buddy who had nowhere else to go.

Rowdy
and obsessed with music, Depp kept constant company with a battered,
$25 electric guitar upon which he began teaching himself, after
catching the fever from hearing a gospel group. “I had
blinders on
to anything else but music; I made that my life,” he says.
Almost
overnight, Johnny Too Bad became Johnny Guitar. While working at
construction jobs, Depp gigged in 14 different garage bands before
clicking with the Kids, a popular South Florida group which he
describes as “Muddy Waters meets the Sex Pistols.”
He recalls,
“There’s no greater feeling than playing guitar in
a band.”

In
1983, at 20, Depp and the band members moved to Los Angeles for their
shot at stardom. The same year, he married Lori Allison, a younger
sister of a musician pal, whom a friend at the time describes as
“tiny, dark, pale, beautiful, and quiet. Johnny was the more
outgoing of the two.” Money got so tight that Depp sold
ballpoint
pens by phone. Although he and Allison divorced two years later,
Allison’s one-time boyfriend, actor Nicolas Cage, hooked up
Depp
with his agent.

Depp
scored a movie job on his first audition. “Johnny was more
worldly, compared to all these pretty boys that
were coming in,” says shriekmeister Wes
Craven, who cast Depp as
the kid who winds up getting sucked into a bed and spewed out as a
bloody geyser in the original A
Nightmare on Elm Street.
“Johnny had an ‘80s, time-worn quality, and looked like
he’d been around.
He chain-smoked and had these yellow fingers. He was an older soul,
somehow.” Though the movie made a far bigger star of
razor-fingered Freddy Krueger than of its teensters, co-star Mimi
Craven remembers,
“Johnny had such an innocence about him with that look.
He had ‘It’ in spades, more than anybody
I’ve ever met.”

Depp’s
“It” factor was well-hidden in Private
Resort>,
a smarmy 1985 teen stinkbomb—featuring Depp’s
first nude scene—about which no one has anything good to say.
“After I saw how
bad I was in my first couple of jobs, I decided I better do something
about it,” says Depp, who, despite working on his acting
chops with a few estimable coaches, could only scrounge up occasional
roles in
TV’s Hotel and Lady
Blue and a
dismal cable-TV-movie, Slow Burn, with Beverly
D’Angelo and Eric Roberts. Then Depp found a
more
prestigious showcase in Oliver Stone’s Platoon,
playing Lerner, the glasses-wearing troop interpreter from
Toonerville.

Professionally,
things dried up again after Depp’s return from several months
filming with Stone in the Philippine jungles. Despite no movie
offers, Depp turned down producer Patrick Hasburgh’s offer to
play
a dimpled undercover cop who busts drug-and-porno-mad high schoolers
in a TV series. Instead, he accepted an invitation by a friend who
lived in his apartment building to join a band—Rock City
Angels.

Meanwhile,
the producers of the TV cop show were dissatisfied with the actor
they had cast (Jeff Yagher, from the TV series V)
and again offered Depp the role. The fewer movie scripts Depp got,
the more tempting the series sounded. Liking the script for 21
Jump Street, and eager to
work with actor Fredric Forrest, Depp signed on, thinking the job
might see him through a lean season or two. Instead, the Fox
Broadcasting Company turned up the teen god heat and thrust Depp into
the living rooms—and fantasies—of pubescent
America. Then,
Forrest departed the show after a few episodes, and two months after
Depp began filming the series, Geffen Records and Depp’s Rock
City Angels band members signed the biggest deal since Madonna’s.
“It was like, oh Christ,”
Depp recalls of hearing the news of his ex-band’s success.
“All I wanted since I was 12 years old was to go on the road.” (To
date, however, the band has not released a second album.)

Part
of Depp’s appeal to kids appears to stem from the hint of
grit and fingernail dirt that lurks beneath the
mousse-and-bronzer-style dramatics of the TV show. Depp does nothing
to polish his image; in fact, the day we met, it looked like his hair
hadn’t been washed anytime recently. “If
you’re honest with
people, without splitting yourself open, sometimes you can help
somebody in trouble,” says Depp, who told the press early on
about his former drug and alcohol use. He’s no one’s idea
of a role model, which suits him fine. “Things are pretty bad if kids
have to write to an actor for advice. I couldn’t tell anyone what to
do. I don’t want to be the Messiah or some spokesman for
‘Just Say No’ to drugs. I’m just as fucked up as the next guy. If I can
help people by saying, ‘I’ve done this and it really
feels bad after a while. I wouldn’t do it if I were you,’
that’s great. But also, the [producers] were trying to make me out to
be this, like,
perfectly baked cake. I don’t want to be what these people
created.”

Some observers say that what “these people” created is,
in fact, an ego monster who keeps cast and crew members of 21
Jump Street, which
is filmed in Vancouver, B.C., in an uproar. According to reports, Depp
has set
fire to his underwear, been deliberately belligerent to his
producers, and even thrown them a punch or two. Two things are known.
When Depp refused to do certain episodes, Richard Grieco, who plays
Dennis Booker, replaced him (and got his own hit series, Booker,
for his trouble). And just before Depp left to begin filming
Cry-Baby, he was
arrested for assaulting a hotel security guard. (And, later, he was
completely cleared of those charges.) “Guys have gotten a
little cocky with me sometimes,” Depp says, in defense of his
alleged behavior. “They either see that they can make themselves look
good in front of their friends by being a man—something about
their penis size, I guess—or they see free lunches in their
future. So,
they figure if they fuck with you, you’ll hit then and they
can take you to court.”

Four
seasons and major TV stardom later, Johnny Depp keeps this calendar;
“Every day,” says the actor, “I mark down
the days left. Two
more seasons . . . contractually.” After a moment, Depp says of
his
$45,000-per-episode series deal: “I don’t want to
bite the hand
that feeds me. I’ve been lucky. It’s put me on the
map. But once
you put your name on a piece of paper, you have no choice. There are
people in ties with very big pens and hulking desks who do bad things
to you.”

Jabbing
his umpteenth Marlboro into an overflowing ashtray, Depp says,
“I’m
a little long in the tooth to be in high school. Clay won’t
help
the bags under my eyes anymore. [The producers] really should do a
Menudo-type thing, just pop other guys into the role, or else, like
on soap operas, if one of the regulars is sick, announce:
‘This week, Lance McGillacutty will be playing the role of Alan
Quartermain.’” He sighs, “They only
cancel TV after it’s been
really bad for a really long time.”

On
the evidence of Cry-Baby and the fact that top filmmakers as different as Tim (Batman)
Burton and Oliver (Born on the Fourth of July)
Stone want to work with him, Depp can probably feel optimistic about
the near term. He enthuses over Edward
Scissorhands,
an oddball romantic parable—Depp plays the title character,
a man-made monster who has gardening shears for hands and hits it big
with women—which he began filming in March.
“Johnny related on
a real emotional level to the character’s pain and
humor,”
asserts Denise Di Novi (producer of Heathers),
who says that she and director Tim Burton chose Depp for his
“dynamite combination of clear, accessible vulnerability,
real
strength, and sexuality.” According to some, Depp won out
over such
contenders as Tom Cruise for the role. Di Novi explains,
“We’re
creating a new character and didn’t want an actor that
carried
baggage with him. Johnny could do any movie he wants, yet he chooses
to take risks on emotionally complex parts. The camera likes his
cheekbones but it also likes what comes through in his eyes.
He’s
deep, complex, intelligent, and sensitive. To me, that suggests he
will fare very well.”

For
his part, Depp, who would “sooner fry burgers or pump gas
than do
Fabian movies,” says, “On my movies, I make my own
decisions
based on what I feel, not on [what] someone says the public wants to
swallow. I try to fight the everyday, normal leading man stuff as
much as I can. [Edward Scissorhands] has what would appear to most
people as a real severe disability. On the other side,
there’s got
to be something good from it. There’s a lot of interesting twists to it.”

Not
the least of these twists has to do with “Winona
Forever.” That’s how the scroll-like tattoo reads when Depp strips off
his
jacket to proudly display his bared biceps. This is but the latest of
Depp’s skin engravings, which even Cry-Baby satirizes as a fetish of the actor’s. “Betty
Sue”—a bright
red heart commemorating his mother—adorns one arm; an
Indian
chief’s head, a salute to his bloodlines, stares out from his
other.

It
was no big deal for him, because he’s had tattoos done
before,” says Mike Messina of Sunset Strip Tattoo—“Tattooers of the
Stars
Since 1971”—whom Depp engaged for about $75 to needle into
his flesh his feelings for Winona Ryder, the actress whom he currently
acts with by day in Edward Scissorhands and cohabits with by night. “The fact that we’re
together and
we’re in love certainly won’t hurt the
movie,” Depp says, with
a warily happy smile. “Winona and I are engaged.
It’s official.
She has a lot of talent and, aside from that, I also happen to love
her. I’m sure we’re going to do more things
together. People have
had great success at that, like John Cassavetes and Gena Rowlands. In
a perfect world, I’d just do movies with [Winona], John
Waters, and
Tim Burton, and live happily ever after.”

Depp
declines to discuss the fact that he also became officially engaged
to his two previous girlfriends, actress Sherilyn (Two-Moon
Junction) Fenn
and, more
recently, actress Jennifer (Dirty Dancing)
Grey, except to say, “I’m pretty
old-fashioned.”

Depp-watchers
profess amazement that his and Ryder’s relationship has the
wandering waif putting down roots for the first time. Temporary ones,
mind you. “I have a house now that I’m
renting,” says the actor
whom John Waters calls “a homeless movie star.”
Although Depp
hints that his and Ryder’s probable marriage has him thinking
about
“sniffing out a place to own and live in, maybe somewhere on
the
east coast,” Waters says: “I’ve only
known Johnny for a
year-and-a-half, but I have a page of addresses for him. The best way
to reach him is to write: Johnny Depp. A Bench. Vancouver, British
Columbia. By the way, he moved again this week.” Depp adds,
cautiously, that for the first time, “I have beds tables,
chairs, a
TV set. And they’re mine.”
And as for friends? “I’ve got a couple who are very
important to
me and I have Winona who is very, very important to me.
That’s all
I need.”

Depp
is less forthcoming about his big-screen future. He says he has
dropped out of Wonderland Avenue,
and Oliver Stone-produced project based on the autobiographical
reminiscences of an adolescent throwaway who ran with Jim Morrison of
the Doors. “It’s going to be an interesting, really
dark movie,”
he says. “But it was taking too long to work out.”
He also
chilled on a project based on either On the Road
or The Dharma Bums,
both by Jack Kerouac, whose work, according to John Waters, Depp
“idolizes” (he collects first-edition copies).
“I thought about
buying the rights, then thought I’d be doing an injustice to
the
real thing,” Depp explains. “Kerouac had
to write those books. Most movies only get made because a company
thinks it’s a good idea, financially.”

I
propose that Depp try to talk John Waters into directing him and
Ryder in a whacked-out remake of Viva Las Vegas
with Depp taking over for Elvis’s hip-swiveling grease monkey
and
Ryder for frenzied, lip-smacking Ann-Margret. “That would be
beautiful,” Depp
says. “I would love
to do something like that. Especially with the Dead Kennedys’
version of the theme song.” But for the present, once Depp
completes his inspired weirdness with Tim Burton in late spring, it
is back to Vancouver for another season of kiss-kiss,
run-your-hands-through-your-tousled-hair, bang-bang.

Awaiting
fans’ and critics’ verdicts on Cry-Baby,
Depp is aware of how quickly one’s 15 minutes of fame can
boomerang. “Most of this business is so full of
shit,” Depp
observes. “People take it so seriously, as if their life
depended
on this episode or that movie. I mean, film burns. You can light it
on fire. It’s not like fucking Confucius written on
stone.” I ask
how Depp foresees future pop culture historians noting his career.
“Johnny Depp got his big break on 21
Jump Street,”
he says, without missing a beat, “went into films, then went
on to
become a Las Vegas entertainer.” Johnny Depp, a lounge act?
“Sure,”
he says. “I would hope that my final hootenanny might be in a
Vegas
or Tahoe nightclub.” Okay, so even a godhead like Wayne
Newton
cannot croon forever. But, as he tears off down Sunset back to
Winona, Johnny Depp—whose singing voice in Cry-Baby
is dubbed by someone else—is still a long way from doing
encores
of “Danke Schoen.”